


tales of the storyteller

by anthropologicalhands



Category: Naruto
Genre: Gen, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Storytelling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-05
Updated: 2014-12-05
Packaged: 2018-02-28 05:41:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,776
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2720819
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anthropologicalhands/pseuds/anthropologicalhands
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sarada wants proper stories about Mama. Papa helps her find them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	tales of the storyteller

Mama doesn’t tell many stories about herself. This frustrates Sarada to no end, not the least because Mama is a wonderful storyteller. She has stories about everyone else, especially about Uncle Naruto or Aunt Ino or the Hokage or especially Papa, but never ever about herself. _Just_ herself.

“Sweetie, no one does anything by themselves,” says Mama when Sarada gives her request, finally looking away from her big new medical textbook. They are sitting in Mama’s office at the hospital, sharing her squashy office chair.

Sarada sets her jaw the way Papa does, hoping to look fierce and grumpy. “Uncle Naruto does. So does Papa.”

“Well, neither Papa nor Uncle Naruto are very normal, are they?”

“Neither are _you_.” Sarada points out.

“Neither am I,” agrees Mama, with some pride. “But I can show you what I do without the world almost coming to an end. Like this procedure for fixing a severed spinal cord. Want to watch?”

She does. Mama’s healing is amazing. It can be bloody and scary, but usually, it is super fun and no one else at the Academy can sit through Sarada’s full descriptions.

“Yeah.”

Mama smiles and closes the textbook. She takes out the model she uses to practice funneling chakra through and goes through the motions, telling Sarada exactly what she’s doing with the smallest words possible so Sarada understands everything. It’s fun.

But it is a _lesson_.

Not a story.

\--

Papa comes back a week early from his mission. It makes Mama and Sarada very happy, especially because Mama’s birthday is coming up and now they have even more time to spend together before they have to share him with the village again.

Of course, Papa coming home early also means Mama didn’t have the chance to take time off from the hospital. As sorry as she is that Mama still has to go to work, Sarada cannot help but feel selfishly happy. Because instead of staying in Mama’s office all alone while she makes her rounds, Papa picks her up from school and they get to spend even more time together, just the two of them.

Papa doesn’t talk very much, and he’s usually tired the first few days after being away for so long, so they spend time together by sitting in the family library, reading. But for once, Sarada finds that she cannot concentrate on her book. It’s the third in her favorite series, but she finds herself irritated with the main character, who is bragging about her mother’s deeds in a way Sarada can’t. She fidgets, annoyed.

“Something wrong?” asks Papa. He hasn’t looked up from his own scroll.

“I don’t want to read this,” announces Sarada, closing it with loud _thunk_. She stuffs it back in the shelf, right in the gap between the second and fourth volumes, because Papa gets twitchy when the numbers are out of order.

“Pick another one then.”

“It won’t work.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t want fictional stories. I want stories about _Mama_.”

That gets Papa’s attention. “Oh?”

“She won’t tell me any.”

“She doesn’t?”

Sarada shakes her head, nearly upsetting her glasses. “Mama tells me stories about the Hokage, or Uncle Naruto, or about fun she had with Aunt Ino, or even about Grandma and Grandpa. She reads your letters to me and tells me allll the stuff you do. But Mama _never_ talks about herself!”

Papa laughs, which surprises her.

“Oh really? Mama didn’t tell you about punching out Kaguya?”

Her nose wrinkles. “Well _duh_. But that’s not a _just Mama_ story. There are Uncle stories and Hokage stories and Papa stories—but no Mama stories!”

Papa has his thinking face on. He’s rolled the scroll back up and tucked it back in the cubby.

“A Mama story is going to be different from an Uncle story or a Hokage story,” he tells her. “Uncle gets excited and makes small things seem bigger and better than they are. Hokage stories are true, but they take forever to get to the point and usually have a lesson at the end. You understand me?”

She nods, uncertain of where this is going.

“Your mama is a medic. Even when she punches an earthquake, or summons Katsuya, her priority is watching to make sure no one else dies. When they do almost die, it is because they were being either very stupid or very brave. That’s the part of the story she remembers best.”

Sarada nods.

“Besides, your mama does tell you stories about herself. You’ve repeated them right back to me several times.”

She puffs out her cheeks. “Yeah, but they’re the same stories over and over and _over_ again. All about when you were all on a team or when she was training with Tsunade-sama.”

“Those are important stories, Sarada,” rebukes Papa, gently. Sarada looks down, flushing.

“ _Bolt_ always has new stories!”

“And he probably isn’t old enough to understand half of them.” Papa sighs. “Sarada, your mama and I _do_ have a lot of stories we want to share with you, but we have to wait until you’re a little bit older to understand them.”

Sarada nods. She has heard this before. “Like why you left the village?”

Papa nods and looks a little sad. “That’s right. But since I was gone, that means I missed a lot of your mother’s adventures. When I leave again, I’ll see if I can find some stories about her. In the meantime, go bother Aunt Ino. She knows the most stories about Mama. Or Tsunade-sama. Uncle Naruto has a few stories of his own, as well.”

Her nose wrinkles. “I tried. He keeps trying to tell me how you fell in love with Mama. I don’t wanna hear about _that_.”

Papa snorts. “Good. He’s probably wrong.”

“So you’ll help me find stories of Mama?” pushes Sarada, scooting closer to him.

Papa nods and pokes her gently on the forehead.

“Promise,” he says.

\--

Papa stays in the village long enough that he’s there for Sarada’s birthday as well as his own, though he leaves before Uncle Naruto’s, which makes Uncle Naruto sulk and everyone else laugh at him.

But then Papa gets his mission, and Mama stays up late to help him put together supplies, and all too quickly Papa is gone from their lives again.

Five days later, the first letter arrives.

Sarada makes Mama read the letter aloud to her, when they are curled up together on the sofa. The first few lines are normal enough. Papa complains about the rainy weather, promises to bring back some mochi he thinks she will like, and says he won’t be able to call them until he reaches the Land of Snow.

Sarada likes watching Mama’s face when she reads the letter, because her eyes crinkle at the corners in the way that means she’s really happy. She also turns red when she skims something Papa wrote especially for her. Mama blushes easily, and when she’s blushing about Papa, it means she’s really _really_ happy.

Mama is halfway through the letter when she stops speaking. Her eyes move over the page but she doesn’t say anything. Sarada starts to squirm, anxious to know what Papa wrote that made Mama quiet.

“Mama?” prompts Sarada. She pulls on Mama’s hair a little, though not hard enough to hurt. “What did Papa say?”

Mama smiles down at her, one eyebrow up, the way she does when she thinks Sarada is up to something. “Oh, Papa is just being silly. He says he met a woman who claims I saved her from a dragon.”

Sarada’s eyes narrow behind her glasses. “Did you? I thought dragons weren’t real.”

“It wasn’t really a dragon,” says Mama. “But she was very young when I was there. I think Papa might have skipped a couple of details. Here, read it yourself.”

She passes the letter to Sarada. She reads quickly, eyes flickering over the rows of neat characters, describing, succinctly, a mission that took Mama into a mountainous village to heal a mysterious illness, only to end up flushing out a shinobi who was terrifying the villagers with genjutsu.

“Did this really happen?” Sarada asks, a little disappointed at the lack of detail.

“Almost. Here, let me tell you a little more...”

Finally, Mama tells her a story. Tells her about the journey, about the first signs that the illness wasn’t as it seemed, and describes the horrible monsters that appeared to her.

For once, Mama tells a story about herself the way she tells stories about others.

\--

Papa continues to send them letters. Somehow, he always manages to include at least one story about Mama.

Sometimes, Mama laughs and says she doesn’t remember anything.

Other times, she corrects one or two details.

And then, every now and then, Mama gets annoyed. Her eyes flash and she says “that’s _not_ what happened, shannaro!” and launches into the _real_ story. She always writes back to Papa a lot more than she normally does, and they end up arguing on the phone when he finally calls. But it isn’t the scary kind of arguing, so Sarada is not too worried. They never take very long, and when Mama passes the phone down to Sarada, she’s always smiling.

Because Papa is sending so many stories home now, Mama starts remembering other missions and telling them to Sarada on her own. Sometimes she tells Sarada a story before Papa gets it to them.

So Papa changes the kinds of stories he sends to them. Now, he not only sends ‘legendary’ stories of Mama, but descriptions of her he hears on the road, from people she never met but whose lives she changed anyway. Papa claims that he records the stories exactly as they were told to him, which usually just makes Mama turn even pinker.

“Your papa is a very silly man,” she tells Sarada more than once, shaking her head.

Sarada agrees. But she likes it best when her papa is silly. Because then Mama laughs even when she’s really tired and Sarada gets to hear more stories about not only Mama, but Papa too. Of the two of them, Mama is still the better storyteller. But her stories start changing, the more stories Papa finds. She tells Sarada more about Papa—not the big impressive ones everybody else knows, but the precious little stories. The ones Mama keeps close to her heart when she misses Papa, and now they are for Sarada, too.

Papa can be larger than life. Mama is so familiar that it can be hard to remember that she’s a legend, too.

Sarada finds contentment in the balance.


End file.
